We propose a novel model for a glass-forming liquid which allows to switch in a continuous manner from a standard three-dimensional liquid to a fully connected mean-field model. This is achieved by introducing k additional particle-particle interactions which thus augments the effective number of neighbors of each particle. Our computer simulations of this system show that the structure of the liquid does not change with the introduction of these pseudo neighbours and by means of analytical calculations, we determine the structural properties related to these additional neighbors. We show that the relaxation dynamics of the system slows down very quickly with increasing k and that the onset and the mode-coupling temperatures increase. The systems with high values of k follow the MCT power law behaviour for a larger temperature range compared to the ones with lower values of k. The dynamic susceptibility indicates that the dynamic heterogeneity decreases with increasing k whereas the non-Gaussian parameter is independent of it. Thus we conclude that with the increase in the number of pseudo neighbours the system becomes more mean-field like. By comparing our results with previous studies on mean-field like system we come to the conclusion that the details of how the mean-field limit is approached are important since they can lead to different dynamical behavior in this limit.
A relation between the freezing temperature ($T^{}_{rm g}$) and the exchange couplings ($J^{}_{ij}$) in metallic spin-glasses is derived, taking the spin-correlations ($G^{}_{ij}$) into account. This approach does not involve a disorder-average. The expansion of the correlations to first order in $J^{}_{ij}/T^{}_{rm g}$ leads to the molecular-field result from Thouless-Anderson-Palmer. Employing the current theory of the spin-interaction in disordered metals, an equation for $T^{}_{rm g}$ as a function of the concentration of impurities is obtained, which reproduces the available data from {sl Au}Fe, {sl Ag}Mn, and {sl Cu}Mn alloys well.
Cryogenic rejuvenation in metallic glasses reported in Ketov et al s experiment (Nature(2015)524,200) has attracted much attention, both in experiments and numerical studies. The atomic mechanism of rejuvenation has been conjectured to be related to the heterogeneity of the glassy state, but the quantitative evidence is still elusive. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations of a model metallic glass to investigate the heterogeneity in the local thermal expansion. We then combine the resulting spatial distribution of thermal expansion with a continuum mechanics calculation to infer the internal stresses caused by a thermal cycle. Comparing the internal stress with the local yield stress, we prove that the heterogeneity in thermomechanical response has the potential to trigger local shear transformations, and therefore to induce rejuvenation during a cryogenic thermal cycling.
We study chaotic size dependence of the low temperature correlations in the SK spin glass. We prove that as temperature scales to zero with volume, for any typical coupling realization, the correlations cycle through every spin configuration in every fixed observation window. This cannot happen in short-ranged models as there it would mean that every spin configuration is an infinite-volume ground state. Its occurrence in the SK model means that the commonly used `modified clustering notion of states sheds little light on the RSB solution of SK, and conversely, the RSB solution sheds little light on the thermodynamic structure of EA models.
We study a recently introduced and exactly solvable mean-field model for the density of vibrational states $mathcal{D}(omega)$ of a structurally disordered system. The model is formulated as a collection of disordered anharmonic oscillators, with random stiffness $kappa$ drawn from a distribution $p(kappa)$, subjected to a constant field $h$ and interacting bilinearly with a coupling of strength $J$. We investigate the vibrational properties of its ground state at zero temperature. When $p(kappa)$ is gapped, the emergent $mathcal{D}(omega)$ is also gapped, for small $J$. Upon increasing $J$, the gap vanishes on a critical line in the $(h,J)$ phase diagram, whereupon replica symmetry is broken. At small $h$, the form of this pseudogap is quadratic, $mathcal{D}(omega)simomega^2$, and its modes are delocalized, as expected from previously investigated mean-field spin glass models. However, we determine that for large enough $h$, a quartic pseudogap $mathcal{D}(omega)simomega^4$, populated by localized modes, emerges, the two regimes being separated by a special point on the critical line. We thus uncover that mean-field disordered systems can generically display both a quadratic-delocalized and a quartic-localized spectrum at the glass transition.
We present a numerical investigation of the density fluctuations in a model glass under cyclic shear deformation. At low amplitude of shear, below yielding, the system reaches a steady absorbing state in which density fluctuations are suppressed revealing a clear fingerprint of hyperuniformity up to a finite length scale. The opposite scenario is observed above yielding, where the density fluctuations are strongly enhanced. We demonstrate that the transition to this state is accompanied by a spatial phase separation into two distinct hyperuniform regions, as a consequence of shear band formation above the yield amplitude.